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Joakim Sandqvist - Graduation Show

Joakim Sandqvist – Graduation Show

Media transitions go slow. They overlap. New medias inherit formal aspects from technological predecessors. Also, pergament rolls, books, analogue and digital fonts are rooted in a material world and has grown out of the interaction between human and technology. Reading habits, established in such interactions, are hard to change, which opens up to the possibility that different types of reading might exist simultaneously.

The exhibition features a video, Workers, Settlers, Hippies and Imaginary Lovers, filmed at a jeans processing facility eighty kilometres outside of Tunis in Tunisia. The video coldly captures hands that scrape, spray, rub, brush, engrave, damage, destroy, crinkle, whisker, stone wash, grind, wash and wipe out jeans. The aged quality of a pair of Jeans, worn by a working body for years, maybe even decades, is here sped up within the logic of the assembly line, where the human body is replaced by balloon like dolls.

Fabric is employed as material in another piece in the exhibition: a collection of woven fabrics are hanged on the wall. These fabrics are made on a jacquard loom, a loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, by some considered a predecessor of the computer. Some of the fabrics are gradients, colour scales that go from light to dark, or gradually change nuance. On some other fabrics there are images Sandqvist found on the internet of test targets used to calibrate cameras. One of these targets is used by the US intelligence service to set its cameras when capturing fingerprints.

All this different fragments points towards a contemporary confusion when it comes to the readability andliability of signs: A torn pair of Jeans, perhaps once a sign of hard work, today transformed into a style marker for an urban middle class (perhaps oblivious to the processes and labour required to create this aesthetic)? The creation of a gradient in weaving that gives a sensation of mixed colours, is that not, just as

in digital technology, only an illusion, built on a binary systems capability to create an image? And the brick sculptures, which are also part of Sandqvist’s exhibition, found on the Ribbersborg beach in central Malmö, turned into familiar structures, into potential “signs” of an industrial city (architectural elements that for example look like parts from factory pipes), are they archaeological findings from the city of Malmö, or made up reminiscences of a fictitious past?

So, a distrust in our sensations capacity to “read” Joakim Sandqvist – Graduation Show may occur. A possible confusion which is not only rooted in our contemporary digital immaterial world, but rather in the dialectics of an industrial analog past that is haunted by the present, and vice versa. — Hans Carlsson

Joakim Sandqvist was born 1988 in Jönköping, he lives and work in Malmö.